This paper investigates the effects of individual social capital on the access of rural households to services.
In the context of agriculture economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine social capital.
The approach originates from the field of sociology and entails a personal network survey. We define four social
capital variables according to tie strength (bonding/bridging) and social distance (bondinglink/bridginglink) between
the respondent and his/her network member. The econometric results suggest that social capital with weaker ties in
combination with socially distant ties (bridginglink social capital) can potentially improve households’ access to rural
services.